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Sunday, June 07, 2015

Check out Joshua Carroll's interesting article on how we have come to understand the universe as we do today: through mathematics.

We are connected to the universe through mathematics… Photo: Universe Today

Let us discuss the very nature of the cosmos. What you may find in this discussion is not what you expect. Going into a conversation about the universe as a whole, you would imagine a story full of wondrous events such as stellar collapse, galactic collisions, strange occurrences with particles, and even cataclysmic eruptions of energy. You may be expecting a story stretching the breadth of time as we understand it, starting from the Big Bang and landing you here, your eyes soaking in the photons being emitted from your screen. Of course, the story is grand. But there is an additional side to this amazing assortment of events that oftentimes is overlooked; that is until you truly attempt to understand what is going on. Behind all of those fantastic realizations, there is a mechanism at work that allows for us to discover all that you enjoy learning about. That mechanism is mathematics, and without it the universe would still be shrouded in darkness. In this article, I will attempt to persuade you that math isn’t some arbitrary and sometimes pointless mental task that society makes it out to be, and instead show you that it is a language we use to communicate with the stars.

We are currently bound to our solar system. This statement is actually better than it sounds, as being bound to our solar system is one major step up from being bound simply to our planet, as we were before some very important minds elected to turn their geniuses toward
the heavens. Before those like Galileo, who aimed his spyglass towards
the sky, or Kepler discovering that planets move about the sun in
ellipses, or Newton discovering a gravitational constant, mathematics
was somewhat limited, and our understanding of the universe rather
ignorant. At its core, mathematics allows a species bound to its solar
system to probe the depths of the cosmos from behind a desk. Now, in
order to appreciate the wonder that is mathematics, we must first step
back and briefly look at its beginnings and how it is integrally tied
into our very existence.

Mathematics almost certainly came about from very early human tribes (predating Babylonian culture which is attributed to some of the first organized mathematics in recorded history), that may have used math as a way of keeping track of lunar or solar cycles, and keeping count of animals, food and/or people by leaders. It is as natural as when you are a young child and you can see that you have one toy plus one other toy, meaning you have more than one toy. As you get older, you develop the ability to see that 1+1=2, and thus simple arithmetic seems to be interwoven into our very nature. Those that profess that they don’t have a mind for math are sadly mistaken because just as we all have a mind for breathing, or blinking, we all have this innate ability to understand arithmetic. Mathematics is both a natural occurrence and a human designed system. It would appear that nature grants us this ability to recognize patterns in the form of arithmetic, and then we systematically construct more complex mathematical systems that aren’t obvious in nature but let us further communicate with nature.

All this aside, mathematics developed alongside of human development,
and carried on similarly with each culture that was developing it
simultaneously. It’s a wonderful observation to see that cultures that
had no contact with one another were developing similar mathematical
constructs without conversing. However, it wasn’t until mankind
decidedly turned their mathematical wonder towards the sky that math
truly began to develop in an astonishing way. It is by no mere
coincidence that our scientific revolution was spurred by the
development of more advanced mathematics built not to tally sheep or
people, but rather to further our understandings of our place within the
universe. Once Galileo began measuring the rates at which objects fell
in an attempt to show mathematically that the mass of an object had
little to do with the speed in which it fell, mankind’s future would
forever be altered.Read more... Source: Universe Today

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About Me

Hello, my name is Helge Scherlund and I am the Education Editor and Online Educator of this personal weblog and the founder of eLearning • Computer-Mediated Communication Center.
I have an education in the teaching adults and adult learning from Roskilde University, with Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) and Human Resource Development (HRD) as specially studied subjects. I am the author of several articles and publications about the use of decision support tools, e-learning and computer-mediated communication. I am a member of The Danish Mathematical Society (DMF), The Danish Society for Theoretical Statistics (DSTS) and an individual member of the European Mathematical Society (EMS). Note: Comments published here are purely my own and do not reflect those of my current or future employers or other organizations.